[Dialogue] The Media's Power Problem

Fri Dec 30 13:18:11 EST 2005

Colleagues, a very thoughtful article on the media and the US America.
Peace, Harry 
  _____  

AlterNet

The Media's Power Problem

By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
Posted on December 29, 2005, Printed on December 30, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/30206/

Journalists should be in the business of providing timely information to the
public. But some -- notably at the top rungs of the profession -- have
become players in the power games of the nation's capital. And more than a
few seem glad to imitate the officeholders who want to decide what the
public shouldn't know.

When the New York Times' front page broke the story of the National Security
Agency's domestic spying, the newspaper's editors had good reason to feel
proud. Or so it seemed. But there was a troubling backstory: The Times had
kept the scoop under wraps for a long time.

The White House did what it could -- including, as a last-ditch move, an
early December presidential meeting that brought Times publisher Arthur
Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office -- in its
efforts to persuade the Times not to report the story. The good news is that
those efforts ultimately failed. The bad news is that they were successful
for more than a year.

"The decision to hold the story last year was mine," Keller said, according
to a Washington Post article that appeared 10 days after the Times'
blockbuster Dec. 16 story. He added: "The decision to run the story last
week was mine. I'm comfortable with both decisions. Beyond that, there's
just no way to have a full discussion of the internal procedural twists that
media writers find so fascinating without talking about what we knew, when
and how -- and that I can't do."

>From all indications, the Times had the basic story in hand before the
election in November 2004, when Bush defeated challenger John Kerry. In
other words, if those running the New York Times had behaved like
journalists instead of political players -- if they had exposed this
momentous secret instead of keeping it -- there are good reasons to believe
the outcome of the presidential election might have been different.

Chiseled into the stone facades of some courthouses is the credo "Justice
delayed is justice denied." The same might be said of journalism, which
derives much of its power from timeliness. When egregiously delayed,
journalism is denied -- or at least severely diminished.

Yet quite a few prominent journalists have expressed a strange kind of media
solidarity with the Times' delay of the NSA story for so long.

Consider how the Washington Post intelligence reporter Dana Priest, for
instance, responded to a request for "your opinion on the New York Times'
holding the domestic spying story for a year," during a Dec. 22 online chat.
"Well, first, I don't have a clue why they did so," Priest replied. "But I
would give them the benefit of the doubt that it was for a good reason, and
as their story said, they do more reporting within that year to satisfy
themselves about certain things. Having read the story and the follow-ups,
it's unclear why this would damage a valuable capability. Again, if the
government doesn't think the bad guys believe their phones are tapped, they
underestimate the enemy!"

Also opting to "give them the benefit of the doubt," some usually insightful
media critics have gone out of their way to voice support for the Times'
news management.

Deferring to the judgment of the executive editor of the New York Times may
be akin to deferring to the judgment of the chief executive of the U.S.
government. And as it happens, in this case, the avowed foreign policy goals
of each do not appear to be in fundamental conflict -- on the meaning of the
Iraq war or the wisdom of enshrining a warfare state. Pretenses aside, the
operative judgments from the New York Times executive editor go way beyond
the purely journalistic.

"So far, the passion to investigate the integrity of American
intelligence-gathering belongs mostly to the doves, whose motives are
subject to suspicion and who, in any case, do not set the agenda," Bill
Keller wrote in an essay that appeared in the Times on June 14, 2003,
shortly before he became executive editor. And Keller concluded: "The truth
is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in
matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted. To my mind, this is
a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a
problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face."

(By the way, Keller's phrase "the war we won" referred to the Iraq war.)

The story of the NSA's illicit domestic spying is not over. More holes are
appearing in the Bush administration's damage-control claims. Media critics
who affirm how important the story is -- but make excuses for the long delay
in breaking it -- are part of a rationalizing process that has no end.

"The domestic spying controversy is a story of immense importance," Sydney
Schanberg writes in the current Village Voice. The long delay before the
Times published this "story of immense importance" does not seem to bother
him much. "The paper had held the story for a year at the administration's
pleading but decided, after second thoughts and more reporting, that its
importance required publication." Such wording should look at least a bit
weird to journalistic eyes, but Schanberg doesn't muster any criticism,
merely commenting: "From where I stand (I'm a Times alumnus), the paper
should get credit for digging it out and publishing it."

Professional loyalties can't explain the extent of such uncritical media
criticism from journalists. Many, like Schanberg, want to concentrate on the
villainy of the Bush administration -- as if it hasn't been aided and
abetted by the New York Times' delay. Leading off his Dec. 24 column with a
blast at George W. Bush for "asserting the divine right of presidents," Los
Angeles Times media critic Tim Rutten proceeded with an essay that came
close to asserting the divine right of executive editors to hold back vital
stories for a very long time. Dismissing substantive criticism as the work
of "paranoids," Rutten gave only laurels to the sovereign: "The New York
Times deserves thanks and admiration for the service it has done the
nation."

A cogent rebuttal to such testimonials came on Dec. 26 from Miami Herald
columnist Edward Wasserman, who wrote: "One of the more durable fallacies of
ethical thought in journalism is the notion that doing right means holding
back, that wrong is averted by leaving things out, reporting less or
reporting nothing. When in doubt, kill the quote, hold the story -- that's
the ethical choice. But silence isn't innocent. It has consequences. In this
case, it protected those within the government who believe that the law is a
nuisance, that they don't have to play by the rules, by any rules, even
their own."

While many journalists seem eager to downplay the importance of the Times'
refusal to publish what it knew without long delay, Wasserman offers
clarity: "Didn't the delay do harm? We know that thousands of people were
subject to governmental intrusion that officials thought couldn't be
justified even under a highly permissive set of laws. We also know that
because knowledge of this illegality was kept confined to a small circle of
initiates, the political system's response was postponed more than a year,
and its ability to correct a serious abuse of power was thwarted. I don't
know what the Times' brass was thinking. Maybe they just lost their nerve.
Maybe they didn't want to tangle with a fiercely combative White House right
before an election. But I do believe that withholding accurate information
of great public importance is the most serious action any news organization
can take. The reproach -- 'You knew and you didn't tell us?' -- reflects a
fundamental professional betrayal."

Perhaps in 2007 we will learn that the New York Times had an explosive story
about other ongoing government violations of civil liberties or some other
crucial issue, but held it until after the November 2006 congressional
elections. In that case, quite a few media critics and other journalists
could recycle their pieces about giving the Times the benefit of the doubt
and appreciating the quality of the crucial story that finally appeared. 

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy
<http://www.warmadeeasy.com> : How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us
to Death." 

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